Burundi Teeters Between Peace, Renewed Killing : Africa: Unlike in nearby Rwanda, the Tutsi minority controls the army. People say that is what has saved them from a new round of slaughter.

All but forgotten by the world, this nation hangs in nerve-racking suspension, balanced between forces that dare pray for conciliation and those who would turn this troubled land into another Rwanda.

The slightest misstep could tip the balance. And after a year in which Burundi witnessed its first free elections, the murder of two of its presidents and a massacre that claimed as many as 100,000 lives, the specter of uncontrolled slaughter in a neighboring land is very real, very chilling.

“Rwanda is terrifying and terrible,” said Venerand Bakevyumusaya, Burundi’s minister of labor. “One would think it would have taught us to avoid that kind of madness, but there is a very real danger that what happened there could happen here. The calm you see here now is not a reassuring calm.”

In colonial times, the two countries were governed first by Germany, then Belgium, as part of a single territory known as Ruanda-Urundi.

As in Rwanda, the Tutsis here are a minority, making up 15% of Burundi’s 6 million people. But unlike in Rwanda, the Tutsis still control the army, and that, people here say, is what has spared them from genocide.

The deep mistrust between the Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi, combined with fears that chaos in Rwanda could inflame extremists on both sides here, has filled this ramshackle capital with anxiety and a well-founded xenophobia.

The countdown is under way, but no one knows if it is toward war or peace.

Expatriates have started talking in code--using the word trees for the tall Tutsis and bushes for the shorter Hutus--to protect conversations from eavesdroppers.

The U.S. Embassy, like other foreign missions, has sent dependents home and cut back to a skeleton staff of six officers. Business has slowed. For months, there have been no tourists heading for the game parks or the source of the Nile River.

The neighborhoods where Tutsis and Hutus once lived side by side and often intermarried have become largely segregated--voluntarily--after violent clashes in Bujumbura over the winter and into the spring. Victims hacked to death were almost always Tutsis; those killed by bullets were Hutus.

“It is a very uneasy feeling,” said a Tutsi businessman, “because you pass someone on the street and he smiles at you. But you wonder if, in his heart, he has thoughts of killing you.”

Sadly, only last June, Burundi was being hailed as a model of democratic reform in Africa. Its president, Col. Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi, was soundly defeated by the civilian Hutu candidate, Melchior Ndadaye, in the country’s first free elections. And, much to everyone’s surprise, Buyoya agreed to honor the results. Ndadaye pledged a new era in human rights.

Four months later, in October, Ndadaye was spirited away one night to an army camp where he was beaten, stabbed and strangled. The vice president and several other senior government officials were also killed.

In a response that drew little attention in the world, Hutu mobs throughout the countryside hunted down and killed as many as 100,000 Tutsis. The Hutus called the massacre a preemptive strike.

Five days after the assassination, Foreign Minister Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu and the de facto head of government, summoned Bujumbura’s tiny diplomatic corps, which includes North Korea and Russia as a holdover from Cold War days.

The diplomats pleaded with Ntibantunganya--whose wife had been killed in the blood-letting and who himself had barely managed to escape with his life--to denounce the killings and to act to end the bloodshed.

“Ntibantunganya was unmoved,” said an envoy at the meeting. He told the diplomats that they were asking for something he could not do.

Pope John Paul II’s representative at the meeting wept.

The assassination apparently convinced Hutu extremists that even though they had won political power via elections--including 80% of the seats in Parliament and 60% of the Cabinet posts--real power would not be theirs until they controlled the guns.

In clandestine fashion, they began arming civilians with South African weapons slipped into the country from Rwanda via Zaire. The shipments gave rise to a rebel army, created, ironically enough, by a government wanting to protect itself from its own institutions.

Hundreds of Tutsis took to the streets in Bujumbura on April 6 to dance and march in celebration when the Hutu presidents of Burundi and Rwanda--Cyprian Ntaryamira and Juvenal Habyarimana, respectively--were killed in Kigali.

The crash of their plane, which had been hit by a rocket, unleashed an orgy of massacres in Rwanda. To date, aid workers estimate the blood-letting has claimed 200,000 to 500,000 lives.

In Bujumbura, Ntibantunganya, apparently having learned some lessons from the October massacres, went on national television within hours of the crash. Flanked by the minister of defense and army chief of staff, he urged his countrymen to stay calm.

Their presence signaled that the army and government had reached some sort of understanding.

Lamb was recently on assignment in Burundi.